Linda Maye Adams's Blog, page 6

5 Articles to Evoke Emotions with Strong Descriptions

Animal – Old dog. labrador retriever macro shot.Photo © mythja | Deposit Photos

This week, most of the construction across the street seems to be finished, except for some clean-up. However, on Friday, from my window near my writing desk, I looked outside and a small backhoe was on the front lawn. Two men in construction hardhats were setting up a v-of fence line. Something will be happening in the next week…probably much jack hammering and squeaky tractor wheels.

Yeah, I’m dragging out my noise-canceling headphones.

All the construction has been driving out the local animals. I’ve had a huge increase in sightings of chipmunks and rabbits. Not as many squirrels.  They must be staying in the trees, nibbling on their acorns.

Story-wise,  I hit a stuck point in a scene I was writing and couldn’t figure out why. I finally watched Becca Syme’s video on Certainty Templates and understood immediately why I was stuck. I kept thinking “Move the story forward.” The problem? There’s a lot of emotion that will be coming into those forward scenes. I needed to work on the emotion in the previous two chapters more than I was to set it all up.

Sometimes learning new stuff is challenging!

So this week I have links for you on descriptions and emotions. I dug deep for this; the earliest one is from 1927 (a caveat: If you roam the old magazines, there may be some language issues).

1. Eye color as a shortcut to characterization by Frank Ernest Nicholas. Writer’s Digest 1927-08: Vol 7 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive. I liked this one because it’s not something you’d ordinarily think about. He also discusses how to blend eye color for different character effects. My only issue with the article? My eye color is not on the list. I wonder exactly what that says…

2 and 3. A part of articles called Words that Kill by Francies H. Ames and Words that Save by  Leonard Snyder.  Writer’s Digest 1950-12: Vol 31 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive. The articles are set but are poorly formatted. They might have been easier to read in the paper version, but it’ll take some navigating to figure them out in e-format. The Kill article explains how adjectives go wrong and why. That’s better than all the advice that advocates simply getting rid of them, and thus robbing your ability to create emotion. The Save article explains how to add emotional words to your story.

4. Working with Words by Thomas M, Uzzell Writer’s Digest 1927-08: Vol 7 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive Read all the way through. The really interesting stuff comes near the end of the article.

5. And if you want samples of overwrought description, see Pet Peeve #2 in Writer’s Digest 1955-10: Vol 35 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive. (Most of the 24 are pretty dated. I felt my eyes crossing with the lavender typewriter ribbon. Why?!).

Next week, I’ll return to the Ginormous Guide Adding Emotions to Fiction with setting and five senses.

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Only five days left for the Humorous Fantasy Story Bundle!

Book giveaway! Battles, Beasts, and Blessings.

Ginormous Guide to Adding Emotion to a Story (Part I)

Dog Jack Russell Terrier looks at the water.

Image © Audit2006 | Deposit Photos

Peggy wanted emotions, and it’s been an area I’ve been trying to understand more about. My apologies for any formatting problems. It looks like WordPress was updated again, and its being fussy.

But before I get to the topic:

Superhero Portal is in the Humorous Fantasy Storybundle for one more week. Click here to get an amazing array of fantasy books for your summer reading.

Book giveaway! Battles, Beasts, and Blessings.

Back to the blog post.

When I was a teenager, we had two dogs, Digger and Snoopy. Digger was a Golden Retriever with a bad attitude toward food. Snoopy was a Chihuahua mix, an old man long before he qualified.

They were escape artists.

Nearly always together, they seized the opportunity and loped into the street for adventure. My heart wrenched when they did this; my imagination went into hyperdrive, picturing them dead in the street. Daily, I spotted a dead dog or cat struck by a car. So much so that when I lived in other locations, I found it a relief not to see that.

The adventuring dogs followed each other, weaving like drunken sailors, their dog tags jangling.

A writing class I attended was like my two dogs. The class had a message board, and one of the writers posted a warning that everyone needed to add emotion in their fiction. Me, being one to always rock the writing boat, asked “How do you identify it?” All the writers followed each other like the dogs, saying, “You need to add emotion to your writing.”

Sigh.

It’s another area in fiction writing that few talk about. Yes, there are books like the Emotions Thesaurus (which I do not have). But this is a complex skill that requires other skills going in. Writers following each other often pass along bad advice discouraging the very thing they want to do.

So let’s start with a basic:

Readers are smart.

They may not know the difference between a protagonist and an antagonist or what an elison is (a word I’ve wanted to use; go look it up. It is writing technobabble and is something you’ve done).

But they’ll know if the story is missing something. They won’t read on to find out more; they’ll simply stop and move on.

Onto the skills…

The first is a foundation skill; if you aren’t doing this, it’s impossible to get t the next step.

Description

Description—good description—is challenging to do. Encouraged by writing exercises that separate description from character, writers churn out florid descriptions that drone for pages.

So many writing gurus recommend taking a minimalist approach, creating fear that you’ll do too much.

It’s only too much if you write it badly.

What’s badly?

Treating it like a writing exercise. The reader is a fickle animal. He wants character. When you do a description like a writing exercise, you yank the reader away from the character and shove him away from the story.Using vague details. This is where the mugshot description comes in; serviceable, and not interesting.Trying to control the exact image the reader sees, much like what we see on film. That pulls in a lot of irrelevant details.Not making the description matter. Readers will understand when you’re checking the box.

The four above keep the reader on the surface, and away from the emotions. Kristen Lamb talks about that on her site.

I’m not including “too much” because that’s deceptive. We want concrete rules to direct us. But it depends on the scene’s context and the characterization. A good rule though is to start with three specifics. If you have to do more, start a new paragraph and do another specific.

Once you start working on this skill, it will be easy to overbalance. We hear “too much” and get an immediate visceral reaction to a book we read where the writer went on and on. We think, “Take all of it out.” The fix might involve taking one or two sentences or removing unnecessary words. The latter is tough to see. ProWriting Aid and Grammarly can identify wordiness. Once you see patterns in your wordiness, you’ll do less of it as you write more.

Caveat: Change the wordy sentence yourself. Don’t let the tool decide what you change.

So how does this get you to emotions?

Well, If you write minimalist, that leaves only the dialogue to convey emotion. Sure, you can say “he ejaculated”—a legitimate dialogue tag—but repeated use of dialogue tags is annoying. Readers are smart. They will notice.

Going minimalist also overbalances, forcing the dialogue to do all the heavy lifting. We all know that sometimes what seems like a simple line doesn’t always get the right emotion across. I sent an email to a coworker, thinking nothing of it, like we do with most emails. She responded with, “I’m sorry if I offended you…” Huh? I had to reread what I wrote. I’d gone a little too concise, and it could have been interpreted as snippy. I hadn’t intended that, and it’s easy to do.

In a story, if the description isn’t helping the dialogue, the reader may misinterpret what you wrote.

Is description once and done? You know, do a description of the setting at the beginning and then that’s it?

No. It’s throughout each scene.  You might have a more detailed description of the setting at the beginning, then bring in sentences here and there with the dialogue that builds on it.

But there will be more on that throughout this guide. Description is the umbrella encompassing everything else.

Action/Movement

The first thing we all think when we hear “action” is a movie hero surging through a battle, gunfire blasting dangerously close, and exploding next to him. I’m not talking about that action.

I’ll call this the Law and Order Principle. Law and Order was a TV series that ran for twenty years. In the first half of each episode, the cops interviewed witnesses. This had huge potential to turn into talking heads; people asking questions and people answering questions. So the characters interacted with the setting. The witness loaded a truck with crates of food; another arranged a display of flowers.

Movement keeps description from being static.

Conveying it is fairly simple, though it takes some thought. A cycling pass may be an opportunity for creating movement; you may not come up with the right word immediately:

Default: The sky was cloudy.

Better: Clouds scuttled across the sky.

This is only rephrasing the sentence with better words. The first is three words, but the description with movement is five.

And guess what? Movement is an opportunity to put in an emotional word.

Adjectives and Adverbs

When I subscribed to The Writer’s Digest, once a year, they cycled to an article or a top ten list lecturing, “Eliminate all adjectives and adverbs.”

I won’t post the link here, but I ran across a writer using his writing as an example of what killing adjectives and adverbs could do. He thought the one without them was better because it tightened the description, but it jettisoned the emotion. The “bad” example was, indeed, too wordy. But if the writer changed a few words and tightened it up, he’d have nailed fear.

So let me be clear: It is NOT a zero-tolerance policy for adjectives and adverbs.

Can you overuse them? Absolutely. If someone critiques your description as boring or too long, snip one adjective or adverb out, reword some sentences. Try replacing one adjective or adverb with a better one. Everyone reacts as if they must go on a serach and destroy mission when careful pruning is more appropriate.

D.J. Wood spoke on editing at both Books20 in Las Vegas and also at Superstars He identified words to avoid because they don’t have subjective meaning. These include:

Odd

Strange

Repulsive

Unsettlingly

Surprising

exotic

unusual

pleasant

beautiful

handsome

ugly

delightful

striking

weird

Some of these come off as vague to me. What does unsettlingly mean? This is an opportunity to use a word that slides in emotion.

The challenge with all of this is that we want to think concrete with emotion in fiction. But concrete is also boring and doesn’t tell the reader anything interesting. “He was angry.” Okay, I’m the reader, and I’m thinking, “So what?”

A book I’m reading, Writing for Impact, states that certain words have a deep cultural meaning and will resonate emotions. When I wrote the story about Digger and Snoopy, I thought about that. I could have written, “I was terrified when they did this” (7 words). In fact, it was my default sentence! Terrified felt like a vague word, so I rephrased the sentence (same number of words) as: “My heart wrenched when they did this.”

So your task is to see if you can spot some of these emotional words in the fiction you’re reading.

Next time, we’ll hit up on some more tools!

 

 

 

 

11 Tips to Crafting Incredible Dream Sequences in Fiction

A small red dog sleeps on his master’s bed and pillow

Photo © Anastasiyastar87 | Deposit Photos (I had a dog like this; it’s a miniature pinscher)

I’m hot on the trail of investigating dream sequences. I definitely want to do one in the story. It fits the scene and where the character is emotionally. Yet, I want to make sure it pulls the reader in, and frankly, there isn’t a lot of information available.

The first time I tried a dream sequence, I asked on writing message boards what would be required for one. Everyone’s reaction was horror; they sternly advised that it was a Really Bad Idea. When I made it clear I was going to do one anyway, it was like I had turned into a vampire; they slowly backed away, holding up crosses and garlic as if they would catch what I got.

Dream sequences are on every top ten list of “Do not do this,” because everyone fears anything that will get them rejected. Thus, no one teaches how to do it correctly.

In fact, I’ve been unable to find anything even in the old writing magazines. Haven’t gone through all yet, but I’ve hit flashbacks now about five times. This might be a challenging area to find much on.

So, this list is based on what I have been able to dig up, and also from sources that aren’t about dream sequences. Sometimes a girl’s gotta improvise…

A dream sequence has to behave as a scene. It has to connect with the rest of the story, and the character. J.D. Robb uses them in every one of her In Death books. In the dreams, it’s either a case that stirs up memories of Eve’s violent past, or a case that has her subconscious working in strange ways (that’s later in the series, so the dreams have evolved).The dream shouldn’t be too abstract. I’ve been guilty of this myself. The dream imagery is fun to play with for my creative side. Realistically, most readers aren’t going to know that being barefoot in a dream might mean you’re defenseless.  At least I wouldn’t rely on that as something the reader needs to know to understand the story; rather, it would be something extra for the reader who knows.The dream shouldn’t be too literal. This is also another problem area where writers treat it, essentially like a flashback, showing backstory the writer couldn’t figure out how to get into the story.
Dreams should be in the happy middle of 2 and 3, vaguely weird but with elements of reality (which is how it connects to the story and the character). They should have that fantastical, surreal element that readers would expect from one. Eve Dallas sometimes finds herself arguing with a murder victim who berates her for not finding the killer.Dreams should be in the middle of the story. I’m pulling this from the same principles as a flashback; it’s middle story territory. You want time to establish the character, and potentially the reason for the dream, as well as the setting. That’s pretty hard to do if you open with it. The reader hasn’t even had a chance to get to know the character.Transitions should be clear. This is like in a flashback, though the transitions will be different. Start with a time jump—that is just a transition that shows time has passed from the last scene. Then spend a sentence or two establishing that what’s coming is a dream. You can’t be subtle here; the reader will miss it and be confused. My only writing rule: do not confuse the reader.For the dream, this site has some tips on either being “infuriatingly vague” or “Go into detail overload” (especially of objects you wouldn’t expect detail on).  This is where you can have fun, as long as you stay within the framework of the dream being connected to the story. Overboard doesn’t mean paragraphs and paragraphs of description. You can do that with two or three sentences worded for maximum overload.Connections to the story should be something obvious to the reader, and maybe something not so obvious, but that’s planted in plain sight. This uses information flow by hiding by distraction.Keep the dream simple. Kane Holder recommends one emotion. But a fictional dream isn’t something that should be terribly complicated. If you keep adding layers and layers of complexity, the reader’s likely to skip it.Keep it short. You probably don’t need more than five hundred words. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but if you keep it simple, it should be more than enough.Action/Reaction: The dream is the action. After the character wakes up, she should react to the dream. It doesn’t have to be a strong emotional reaction (like to a nightmare); it can be puzzlement of “Where did that come from?” She can talk to someone else about it over breakfast, or even later in the day.Consider how long the reaction lasts. Your character’s reaction doesn’t necessarily end with that scene. She could be feeling off all day, or irritated. In the Eve Dallas series, in a few books, the nightmares are so disturbing that she has to talk to someone about them. All about context.

Dream sequences aren’t to be feared, especially when you’ve approached it making your characters more complex.

Anything I’ve missed? Hit reply and tell me.

Superhero Portal is in the Humorous Fantasy Storybundle for the next three weeks. Click here to get an amazing array of fantasy books for your summer reading.

Book giveaway! Battles, Beasts, and Blessings. Find some new writers. There are over 50 books to pick from.

Transform your fiction writing with these links

Tricolor Australian Shepherd (Aussie) Puppy Looking Out a Window

Photo (C) herreid | Deposit Photos.

It amazes me how much I’m finding just reading the old The Writer magazines. Most of our information today is filtered though only a handful of people. So if they’ve learned information and discarded others as not workable for them, we miss out on different ways that might help us learn better.

Onward to the links!

Mind your Ps, by Virginia Hallam Findlow. This article is on a topic that I’ve wanted to know more about: information flow. A basic example of information flow is when a character knocks a letter opener off a desk. She puts it back on the desk and we think nothing more of it…until the climax when she’s facing the bad guy, near death, and her groping hand finds the letter opening (cycling also works great for this; you may not know that you need this until the climax. You can zoom back to Chapter 3 and add a sentence or two).

This article provides a key piece of knowledge that I needed: information flow is about cause and effect. And sometimes you have to lay in a long string of subtle information for the cause before you land on the effect. This is an offshoot of character and reaction.

The Bedrock of Experience by William E. Henning. This hits another misinterpreted piece of writing advice, “Write what you know.” I once critiqued a novel where the writer thought his character could only be a human resources employee because he was an HR employee. This article is a more “adult” version of write what you know and what you should do if you run into an area where your knowledge is lacking.

The Four Thousand Word Short Story by Isabel Moore. Don’t skip this one even if you never write short stories. This discusses structuring the story: character with a problem. Flashbacks make a brief appearance, too. But the piece of advice I found mind-blowing occurs near the end:

Complications are character complications.

Isabel Moore

We’re taught so much these days that plot is the only thing to focus on and that everything derives from that, not from the characters. It’s another variation from a webinar I attended.

Make your characters complex, not your plot

Kevin Eikenberry

Robert Malloy follows the above article with one called Random Thoughts on Fiction Writing. It’s as it says it is, a collection of random thoughts. They had the same problem then as we do today: Writers with this experience giving advice that may not fit how you write. He hits on outlining or not (pantsing is, I think, a usage that showed up with the internet). But the section to really read is the one on production. This was the era when writers wrote for the Pulps lived off their writing. It shows the fallacies of word count goals, and what is a respectable amount of writing (which won’t be what you think it is based on today’s numbers, on reading about others). It’s a sane look at how people talk about word count nd remains true today.

Fiction’s Memory: The Flashback by Sarah Litsey. Evidently, even in 1951, people were already saying “Don’t do flashbacks!” because writers did them badly. The author describes the setup before the flashback, as well as transitions (probably the hardest thing to do well), and then three types of them. Transitions are one of the little skills that I’m digging into learning more about. It’s so small, and seems insignificant, and yet can be a stumbling point that causes the reader to lose track of the story.

I’m really hoping to stumble across one on dreams, since that’s another “Do not” and I’m thinking of doing one in the current story (because it fits the scene). I’m thinking of bringing in a second and third project, an amateur sleuth mystery and a cozy mystery set in space. I might try my hand at flashbacks in one of those (probably the first one).

Any burning craft skills you want to learn more about?

Superhero Portal is in the Humorous Fantasy Storybundle for the next three weeks. Click here to get an amazing array of fantasy books for your summer reading.

Book giveaway! Battles, Beasts, and Blessings. Find some new writers. There are over 50 books to pick from.

Responsible Use of Placeholder Brackets in Your Story

Watch dog

Responsible Use of Placeholder Brackets in Your Story

Photo © KelkoNiki | Deposit Photos — isn’t the puppy cute?

I thought this would be a fun topic because, frankly, there are at least two other writers (one well-established) who put it on the Do Not Do This List of Doom. Anytime someone makes that declaration, it brings out the non-conformist in me and I start coming up with reasons why you might have to do it.

Placeholder brackets are a phrase inserted in the story to flag that something needs to be done, or as a reference.  For example:

[RESEARCH WHAT THIS BEACH LOOKS LIKE]

The logic behind the Do-Nots is that it can be a form of lazy writing that will interfere with your creativity. That can be true. More about that further down.

But, like anything with writing, it’s not a one-size-fits-all.

Where or when might you use them?

Keep track of time in the story. I use this at the start of each scene, listing the month, day, and time. Believe me, it’s easy to lose track! I didn’t plug in my time placeholders and discovered a scene that needed at least two hours had some time issues. Oops.

Names. Sometimes you just aren’t ready to decide on a character’s name, so you stick a placeholder in. One writer used placeholders for her character names until she got to the end of the book. I couldn’t do that myself, especially not a main character. That would make me crazy. But it’s what works.

Details that won’t impact the story. I’m not going to drop everything and search online to research the fall color of an oak leaf. It’s not something that will affect the direction of the story. In some cases, I’ve also found that sometimes, after a bit of time to think about it, I realize I didn’t need the detail.

Time to think. I’m #1 Intellection, so sometimes I get a little stuck while I think about a character’s reaction. If I typed the next word (as is commonly recommended), I would skip over that entirely. A placeholder kind of puts it in my face that I need to pay attention to it.

If stopping to research sends you down a rabbit hole. You know what I’m talking about. You search for fall colors to get the oak color, and the next thing you know it’s three hours later and no story is done. I have a friend who’s #1 Input, so she’ll find all the rabbit holes.

Placeholders like this are a great tool because you can make a list of them after you finish a scene and deal with them all at once. Ideally, you shouldn’t let any of them sit too long; you don’t want to make more work for yourself.  I usually tackle them after I finish the scene.

I’ve also found that I need them more in the first chapters than elsewhere in the story. That’s where my relationship with the story is still changing and I don’t want to interrupt the flow.

When should you avoid placeholders?

When you get stuck on a major plot point. On a novel I was cowriting, we got stuck and couldn’t figure out how the heroine should be captured. So we put in a placeholder and decided to fix it on the revision and continued writing. When we came back to it much later, a fix that might have taken a few days to work out turned into massive amounts of revision. Fixing it in a completed story broke other things, and fixing those broke still more.

When your creative side needs the research to create. If you need the research to move forward in the plot, stop where you are and do it. This is the reason the writers say to not use placeholders, and it’s a good reason.

When you’re crashing on a deadline. I was sick and trying to finish a story due at an anthology that day. Cold brain made me stick on one of the descriptions, so I slapped a placeholder in, knowing I would catch it on a cycling pass. Got the end, called it done, and sent it. About two days later, I’m thinking, “Wait, was there a placeholder in that story?” Sigh. (The story got a form rejection, which meant the first reader never got off the first page. I was glad for the form rejection!)

How do you use placeholders?

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Superhero Portal is in the Humorous Fantasy Storybundle for the next three weeks. Click here to get an amazing array of fantasy books for your summer reading.

Book giveaway! Battles, Beasts, and Blessings. Find some new writers. There are over 50 books to pick from.

Humorous Fantasy in StoryBundle

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4 Secret Writing Skills

Fourth of July pet celebration and Independence day pets celebrating the United States and national federal holiday with dog puppy cat and kitten including bird and hamster wearing hats with 3D illustration elements.

Photo © Santalucia Art Inc.| Deposit Photos

Three corners in the intersection have disappeared under construction. Even though this construction is making the area better for walking, right now, it’s not good for walking!

This month, I’m in a book giveaway called Battles, Beasts, and Blessings. Isn’t that a great name? Please click the link and see if there are any fantasy stories that interest you. These are a great way to find new authors to read.

Onward to the topic. One of the things that concerns me is that we’re losing some of the writing skills in the quest to only help beginners. I found it interesting in a discussion with another writer about Shawn Coyne, a former editor and the man behind Story Grid, that he is struggling with terminology for what he is describing—I think—because it’s been long forgotten.

Everyone teaches the big brush strokes like plot, often wrapped up in outlining; anything that can’t be easily taught is given hasty brush strokes, but no specifics; anything deemed a skill writers always get wrong, no one talks about at all (flashbacks anyone?).

But after you master the big brush strokes, then what? I felt like I plateaued myself after I took Dean Wesley Smith’s online course on story structure (which does not involve outlining). It turned out I now need finer brush strokes.  Dean also is more concept-based, which is fine to a certain point, but I needed specifics.

Ergo, we have four secret writing skills because no one talks about them.

The Sense of Proportion. Despite the odd title, this is on story structure (but not from an outlining perspective). Most writing resources talk about three-act structure for novelists. Why? It’s easy to teach because it has a built-in structure, and everyone relates to movies.  It also lends itself to thinking that each part of the story is equal in length. The article describes extensively what goes in the middle,  and provides a hard number for how long the middle should be: 3/4s of the story.

Secrets: Pacing and the validation (the article just calls it the ending). Guess where it says flashbacks should go? The middle.

If you like dogs, read it for the illustration using a dachshund. I was totally delighted by that image.

Descriptions Readers Won’t Skip. This a fairly detailed article about how to balance doing description while avoiding doing too much.

Secrets: There’s solid advice on making your descriptions shorter without sacrificing what’s in them, something the description minimalists don’t discuss. The author also gives a tip on hiding a character in plain sight.

Spreading Dialogue: This whole discussion is a writing secret. This was just a small paragraph in a larger article From Zoa Sherburne in the Writer, January 1955. Heck, I almost passed the article by, but this was a useful small thing that you’ll find in books by longer-term writers.  It’s part of From Our Rostrum.

Most writers will write narrative and dialogue like this:

“Dialogue dialogue, dialogue.” Then three or four sentences of narrative. “More dialogue.”

Which makes for a big paragraph. Spreading dialogue is:

“A sentence of dialogue.”

Three or four sentences of narrative.

“Three sentences of dialogue.”

Two sentences of narrative.

It helps provide white space (something obviously needed even in the 1950s!) so the reader doesn’t feel overwhelmed by a large chunk of text. It also can be used as a pacing tool. Pretty cool.

Flashbacks: This shows up on every top ten list as “don’t.” Why? Because writers do them badly. Why do they do them badly? Because no one teaches how to them correctly. Why doesn’t anyone teach how to do them correctly? Because they don’t know how, so they tell everyone not to do them. Ugh!

But it also makes it a writing secret finding this pair of articles from the 1950s that explains how to do them. The key is the transitions, though in the proportions article, that author says flashbacks are middle story territory.

Operation Flashback (also you may want to explore the article The Gentle Art of Cutting)Triple Threat Flashback

I’m still hunting for articles on the forbidden territories of dreams and prologues.

In the meantime, happy Independence Day!

The Most Misinterpreted Piece of Writing Advice

Couple of Jack russell watch the sunset with big sun

Photo © AntonioGravante | Deposit Photos

This post was inspired by the book Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, which discusses the misinterpreted advice in a fairly detailed way that made me want to take notes.

If you’ve made the usual rounds of writing advice, especially in Writer’s Digest, you’ll have seen a laundry list of advice. It’ll be in the form of a top ten list, like the silly kill your darlings. There’s one that’s on every list, and it leaves a lot of writers struggling to understand it:

Show, not tell.

MasterClass describes it as “simple” advice, and that’s not true. It’s actually an advanced level writing skill that someone—probably in the 1990s—tried to simplify for the new writer starting their first novel. Might have been an agent after seeing manuscripts come into the slush piles and immediately getting form rejections.

Of course, it sounds easy to explain, and everyone adapted it. Even what the MasterClass article describes is NOT easy at all. I’ve been reading old The Writer Magazine issues, from the 1940s and 1950s. They describe elements of it (though the phrase “Show not tell” is never mentioned, so it definitely came later), and sometimes I have to reread it to check my understanding. Often, one element is implied, I think, because they assume you already know. In recent years, it gets too simplified.

It’s characterization.

How else can you explain why a writer would think that showing a character being angry is shaking a fist without addressing characterization at all?

The problem starts here, with how writers think of a novel versus reality:

The left Venn diagram originates with all the craft books because it’s easy to teach plot. So much so that many writers use plot and story interchangeably, though they are two different elements. Often, you’ll hear writers ask, “Are you plot-focused or character-focused?”

Well, without characters, plot is pretty meaningless. Story is the overall umbrella, encompassing characters next, and everything else—plot, setting, description, dialogue, theme—is through the character’s eyes.

So if your character is only getting angry by waving his fist, it’s barely hitting superficial “showing”, and is a false detail. Your character being angry is a whole story action. What led up to it in the previous scenes? Does he have any traits that you need to bring in earlier that would contribute to it? (i.e., he gets angry when he’s frustrated.) What did one of the other characters do, or not do? What is his reaction after the angry scene? What is the impact of it in the scenes following?

Then there’s the setting and the five senses. This character who is angry is interacting with a setting and experiencing the five senses in some way. In the book Dogged by Death, an off-page character is so angry at being fired that she gets in her car and loses connection to the world around her. She hits a dog and doesn’t even notice (the dog had a broken leg and was okay). For this, the main character is a veterinarian. A minor character runs in to tell her about the dog, and they run out to help the dog. And they’re all having different reactions to what just happened.

There are lots of little ways to do this:

Word choices that evoke an emotional reaction (study Nora Roberts; she does this really well)Rhetorical devices (these are fun to play with).MetaphorsSpecific details (which will use the five senses), and details that communicate judgment or opinions (this is from the book I mentioned at the top of the post).

There are also lots of big ways to do this:

The reaction of other characters, even ones who may not be present. If your character has a big blow-up with her boyfriend, her best friend might call the guy a rat, a parent might think the character overreacted, and another might think she needs to bang another guy.Your angry character enters the next scene and reacts to what just happened. Or it could take several scenes to work through the reaction. Jack Bickham talks about action and reaction in Scene and Structure (also an advanced skill).A later scene could present an unexpected plot event caused by the character’s original angry reaction.

And it’s not easy to do. Characterization itself is often reduced to character worksheets because that’s similar to outlining. You could spend years learning about characterization and always find something new.

Worse, everyone tends to think only about the scene that needs the reaction. If the reader has gotten that far, they may not buy into the angry scene if no groundwork has been laid with the characterization prior. It’ll feel like it dropped in from the sky from nowhere.

Show versus tell is something that starts at the first line of the story and continues throughout, tangling itself into everything.

From my writing archives

cat on beach and blue sky

Photo (C) Pakhnyushchyy | Deposit Photos

This week, I want to share of collection of links to more information about writing.

First up is a book for all of us who don’t write exactly in whatever manner someone else prescribes: Survival Kit for Writers Who Don’t Write Right. Unlike other people I’ve seen over the years, she tells us to pick what works and ignore the rest. Who does that? Her list of items is also not a system or has any special rules. All of it is very practical. From me: If you discover tools that might be helpful in how you write, pick only one and try it out. Don’t try to do them all at once because it’s easy to get overwhelmed and stop altogether.

Details are Important – This was a very hard topic for me to learn to do. The article’s old because few seem to talk much about it these days. Even then, I can understand why it’s such a challenge; it’s a huge topic that seems deceptively small. In it:

Study details by marking those of characters with one color, setting with another, etc. This is very similar to Margie Lawson’s Edits system.For a simple action step: Be specific if you mention anything. If a character hides behind a tree, specific would take it to a sturdy oak. A street is two lanes or asphalt; a cat becomes a tuxedo cat or a silver tabby. You would do this pretty much all the time. When I was co-writing a book, we hadn’t done that much of this kind of thing. But in a scene in the woods, we mentioned hickories and other plants local for Virginia. Readers all commented now how those scenes felt like Virginia. It makes that much of a difference.

On dialogue tags…this is a controversial writing topic, despite all it does is tell the reader who said what. Writer Lawrence Block notes in his book Telling Lies for Fun and Profit that the following tags should be avoided: state, aver, avow, and declare. Why? Because they sound too much like a newspaper reporter. It’s always important to look at how some seemingly simple things can affect reader’s perceptions. There’s some discussion that said has fallen out of favor, though this depends on who you talk to (so mostly opinion). Audio books require something to associate with the dialogue, but using said more frequently stands out in annoying way when read aloud. Which is all to say there’s no wrong way to do this, but more of a balance of what you do.

This is a tip from Dave Farland, who passed away last year. In every scene, add a sense of light (or time). This is incredibly difficult to do consistently. I have to use a placeholder at the top of each scene to make sure I know what time of day, and even what month of the year it is. We’re about to hit the longest day of the year; after that, sunset starts marching in a few minutes earlier each day. I left off the placeholder initially; once I added it, I realized the timeline was off. If the character was at this location for X amount of time, it would have gone from light outside to dusk…and I had the sun only just setting. Oops!

This is what my placeholder looks like (since I sometimes need examples myself to help me understand better):

[Friday, August 4. About 5:30ish, Hotel Bellamy Lobby]

Completely non-writing subjects!

Fruit Flavor Pairings Chart. This chart shows what fruits go well with other fruits, as well as the spices. I was surprised that banana doesn’t go with that many fruits, especially considering everyone pairs it with everything. I wish I had one of these with vegetables. So far, I am reduced to searching for “What spices go with carrots?”

Foundation Training Video. I found this on another blogger’s site. He said that he had done it and his back pain had disappeared over time. I had some to (from how I pick up objects), so I thought why not? Oh. My. Goodness. For the first month, I had to myself I was doing it correctly. I’ve had hereditary flat feet that doctors assured me would only get worse as I got older; arch supports would be only a stop-gap measure. The right foot had more problems, and evidently the leg muscles weren’t all working the way they should. I didn’t like the answers the doctors were giving me, so this turned into an opportunity and has improved my feet and balance. I’ve been working my way through their streaming.

Things I wished I known About writing when I Started

jack russel dog resting and relaxing on a hammock or beach chair under umbrella at the beach ocean shore, on summer vacation holidays

Photo © damedeeso | Deposit Photos

This week, our air quality zoomed up to Code Deep Maroon in the Washington DC area. I think they had to make up a new color because the Canadian wildfires made the air quality so bad. We’re hundreds of miles from Canada, so it’s pretty amazing that it looks like the worst days of brush fires when I was in Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, construction crews are demolishing the other side of the street. Despite all the noise, I’m finding it interesting to watch the process of what they’re doing. They jackhammered the sidewalk. Then a bulldozer carved it all up into chunks of big rock, and a backhoe dumped it into a dump truck. Now a stream roller is flattening it out. I believe they will be adjusting the grade of the street on my side, which would be a welcome thing; when it snows, cars get stuck on the hill.

Onward to the topic:

This topic was inspired by a craft fest workshop by Kevin J. Anderson at the upcoming Superstars (they listed a schedule pretty early, so this may not be locked in). One of the challenges is that it’s hard finding craft information beyond what I’ll call Beginner-Advanced.

Never settle for a lower standard.

This can come across multiple ways, and has for me. The first was submitting to non-paying magazines. It was common knowledge that you should do that to build credits, but no professional writer would have said it. That may have originated with non-paying magazines who wanted any submissions and novice writers who shared it.

This lower standard played on my subconscious: My critical voice whispered in my ear, “You’re not good enough to get paid for your writing.”

That’s pretty deeply ingrained in the writing culture. Some magazines portray getting paid as if it were vulgar and you should suffer for the art. Others state they are doing you a “favor” by listing your biography and website link, or simply by publishing you. My own family thought the only way I could ever get paid for writing was to become a Hollywood screenwriter or a journalist, neither of which I liked. Indie opened the doors, but with that standard so ingrained, writers will happily fork out several grand for developmental editing on a first book, then pay for ads when the book doesn’t sell…instead of working on a new book and hitting a new skill to learn.

But the other problem I’ve run into—I discovered it reading The Fifth Discipline. Companies will set a standard, such as delivery time. For whatever reason, they can’t make the delivery metrics. Instead of identifying why, they lower their standard by expanding the time. Because they haven’t fixed the original problem, they continue to fall behind on the delivery schedule, and reduce their standards again until it becomes a crisis that they lose business.

I did this with novels. Ever since I wrote my first novel, which was still during traditional publishing days, I ran into problems with getting to the required 90K. I’d end up settling for short stories and at one point despaired that I would ever write novel-length fiction. I sought craft books to explain the problem, but by then, they were focusing on getting a new writer to finish their first novel, and baby step problems.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I didn’t like the idea of settling for short stories. If I wrote a short story, it should be because I wanted to, not because it was second best.  However, the desire to solve the problem led me to do a lot of dumb things. I wasted money on ineffective writing classes without screening them. This was how I discovered that all the fixation on plot-plot-plot that is prevalent among the beginner-advanced writers hurt my writing. On one story that ran too short, I added more and more plot, and it became a convoluted mess.

With indie, I kept circling back to novellas, since they were returning in popularity; in fact, other writers said, “Write novellas instead.” But it still felt like lowering my standard. Superhero Portal got to 50K (where I’m comfortable with being novel length; I don’t need 90K), but I’m still working on the skill. I’d like to land on it consistently because I wanted that book to be a novel, not because I accidentally got there. But I’m also still trying to understand the cause.

Be willing to walk away from any class

With the internet, anyone can teach writing classes, including people who have little writing experience. Sometimes it’s easy to determine if a course isn’t going to be useful; a community organization offered a course on the history of Washington DC for writers, but sample chapters of the instructor’s books showed that he wasn’t good at getting it into the story.  Someone else might offer a 2-hour course on writing a novel; that’s such a broad topic that it’s probably only for someone thinking of starting their first novel.

Others…not so obvious. The higher the price and the longer the course, the more information is needed. I signed up briefly for a community that had writing courses and came recommended by someone. Their material said it would include advanced courses and master classes. So I thought I’d give it a try. Once I got inside and saw what was offered, I determined that their definition of advanced was not the same as mine. With only basic material available, anything above it looks advanced. It was what I’d call beginner-advanced (they were calling it mid-level, so you can see how confusing the definitions can become). I asked for a refund and walked away.

But I’ve also not always done that. One time, I signed up for a class on the old Forward Motion site. The class was called “Pantser-Friendly Outlining.” From the sound of it, I figured it might help me solve the problems of getting to a novel-length so I signed up (this was at a point where I was firefighting writing skills, which was not a good practice).

The class was four weeks and had about twenty writers who all gleefully declared, “This is fun!” and “This is easy.” I stared at the instructions and tried to force-fit how I wrote into them. It was very painful; it felt like fingernails on a chalkboard. The instructor was immediately frustrated with me because I wasn’t comprehending what she thought was something easy.

I nearly quit after that first painful session. But I felt like I’d already signed up for the class; I needed to take all the lessons. So I went back for all three weeks, and history repeated itself. The other writers, still amazed I wasn’t comprehending something so easy, explained it to me like I was stupid. Fingernails on a chalkboard all the way through.  A few weeks after, I looked at what I created with those lessons, and I didn’t understand how I did anything in the class at all!

When I first found Dean Wesley Smith’s classes—and for pantsers!—I was about to take yet another course (I think it was Beginner-Basic on description). I looked at the first lesson, decided it wasn’t worth my time, and walked away. I do feel a little guilty about spending the money; if it’s over $50, I think a long time before considering taking it. If it’s $20, I’ll grab it and hope for the best (as I write this, I just purchased a lecture packet from Margie Lawson on endings. Though the packets focus on revision, they scratch my intellection itch with power words and rhetorical devices).

I also discovered that as high input, I will collect classes; intellection will take them when it feels the need; and Learner (#6) will also take as much as it needs to learn. I was feeling guilty because I wasn’t always finishing Dean Wesley Smith’s workshops (in many cases, repeat information; in others, he went off the topic I wanted to learn).

If the class is not working, or it’s repetitive, you can stop. There’s no point in fingernails on the chalkboard.

Finally…

Stand up for your writing process

This has been one of the hardest things for me to learn. Everyone’s writing process is unique to them. There will be some things that work well for them, and other things that don’t work at all.

But it’s treated as a one size fits all (which means “without modification”), both on the outlining side and on the pantsing side.

I was on message boards for many years, and enjoyed it then later hated it. The writers pressured me and other pantsers to outline. At one point, I succumbed, figuring everyone else must know better and not trusting my writing process. I felt very frustrated by it at the time and thought it was like throwing paint at the wall. That was how I landed in the “Pantser-Friendly Outlining” class and tried The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing.

I’ve also been lectured by pantsers because my writing process didn’t exactly fit that dogma. In that case, I changed my process for two reasons:

1. I kept getting stuck and doing redrafts of scenes. For the beginning of the story, it was often multiple redrafts of the same few scenes. It was frustrating because I felt like something was missing and I didn’t know what it was. The dogma was to “trust your subconscious” and “write the next word.” The second part of that advice resulted in the redrafts (it was apparent this was a direct cause once I changed my process a little). The change? Using Plottr to type out ideas about where the scene might go, regardless of if I used any. I was lectured because I “wasn’t trusting my subconscious.”

2. I don’t always think of things in order. Details are sometimes hard for me to get into the story on the first typing and have to evolve; also, when they get added may depend on another scene six chapters in.  Cycling is a great tool for this but also carries a surprising amount of opinion about what’s “right” attached to it. In Superhero Vs. Superhero, I got to an action scene and only then did I know what setting details I needed in the first chapter. I had to make multiple cycling passes through the first chapter, layering in the details as they evolved in the later chapter. Then I repeated it for another action scene that followed because my creative side said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” Everything affects all the scenes in between, so I was doing many passes as my brain pinballed around. The dogma? That cycling is only the last 400 words. I thought I’d gotten away from “This Is The Only Way To Do This” when I left the message boards.

This time, as opposed to when I was on the message boards, I didn’t question what I was doing. My creative side was singing with joy because it was having so much fun being in control of where it wanted to go in the story, not because of a random writing rule.

But it’s hard. When you are lectured by someone, it’s easy to start second-guessing yourself. So it’s important to not only stand up for your writing process, but also to not get in the way of yourself when it needs adjustments.

Okay, those are the things I wished I knew about writing. What are yours?